


Echoes of Dreamland

by Deepdarkwaters



Series: Flame Keepers [1]
Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: 1970s, 1980s, Artistic Sensibilities, Boarding School, Boys Kissing, Fluff, M/M, Teen Angst, Teenage Rebellion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-08
Updated: 2018-04-16
Packaged: 2018-05-12 12:24:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5665972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/pseuds/Deepdarkwaters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Galahad and Merlin are at Harrow together, fifteen years old and full of teenage hatred for everybody in the world but each other. Then they're sixteen, with enormous shifting feelings. Then they're seventeen, and their cosy perfect summer is interrupted by a mystery.</p><p>Or: how Harry and Julian find Kingsman before Kingsman find them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Another Bloody Year

**Author's Note:**

> 1) Before we got more TGC info about Merlin I had this weirdly insistent headcanon about him being related to some of the characters in Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein. It's not really a crossover, I'm not tagging the fandom and you don't have to know anything, but they're a totally perfect match for him (a spy and two pilots!) so I'm using them to fill in his family instead of making them up completely. If you're bothered, there are some slight spoilers ahead.
> 
> 2) This series is from ages ago before we knew Merlin's name is Hamish - he's Julian here, I got attached and don't want to change it :D
> 
> 3) Title is from the Harrow school song.
> 
> [Tumblr](http://deepdarkwaters.tumblr.com)

* * *

"Another bloody year," Harry says moodily around a pair of stolen cigarettes, and Julian says, "Mm." That's it. That's all the conversation they need, and when it's done they simply lean there against the bricks of someone's garden wall in companionable silence, taking advantage of the cool September shade as camouflage to partake of the first sneaky smoke of the term. Harry strikes a match and cups a protective hand around it, touching the flame to each cigarette in turn and passing one to Julian before drawing deeply on his own. He fights the violent urge to cough, and lets out the breath in a slow pluming curl of grey that winds its way up in front of his face and gets whipped away by the breeze.

It's an unspoken understanding that neither of them particularly likes to smoke, so there's very little inhaling and quite a lot of carefully casual posing even though there's nobody else around to see it. An embarrassing thing to be caught doing in any other circumstances, probably, but strangely permissible with one's best friend; a sort of ritual, as solemnly observed at the start of every term as all the other ridiculous traditions the school inflicts upon its boys.

"Do you know what Mr Tompkins asked me?"

Julian's voice sounds slightly scratchy from the smoke. It's the first thing all day that makes Harry sort of want to smile; there's something almost musical about it, the rough rasp laid like a veil over the gentle lilt of his accent. "Enlighten me," he says lazily, making a 'go on' gesture in the air with his cigarette held louchely between two fingertips. "I'm sure it was tremendously witty."

"He said 'Where do you see yourself in twenty years?' Out of nowhere, no 'good morning, Beaufort-Stuart', 'how nice to see you again after this long lonely summer', nothing. In for the kill like a bloody tiger trying to get me to join his politics club."

"I hope you told him to go forth and multiply."

"Not exactly." Julian shifts against the wall, crossing one ankle over the other and nonchalantly leaning there with a sort of fluid, unconscious grace that Harry envies like fury. He has to rehearse his own insouciant slouch before the mirror to make it look genuine. "I told him I'll be living in my castle doing whatever I like, much the same as I do now but older and richer."

"Bet he was livid."

"Called me idle boy then went to bother Whittaker instead."

"That fatuous little whiner. Good luck getting him to understand anything more complex than counting to ten without looking at his hands."

Beside him, Julian breathes out a little sound that might be a laugh. "I've missed this boiling hatred for humanity. Everyone at home is so _pleasant_."

"Well, there'll be no shortage of it this term, I assure you." Fifth Form, Harry's older brother told him, is a nothing sort of year, the school equivalent of a Wednesday: right in the middle, too old to be one of the youngsters who can plausibly pass off rule-breaking as ignorance, but not yet granted all the privileges of Sixth Form, not as close to escape. It sounds miserable. The days seem to stretch out interminably ahead of them, like a monotonous grey motorway where all the cars are stuck at a crawl. Half term feels like it might as well be a decade away.

(Somewhere coalmine-deep inside himself, Harry knows his misery probably has a considerable amount to do with being fifteen and spending an entire summer listening to the Velvet Underground and reading Baudelaire; but never mind that.)

He smokes his cigarette down, grinding the end dead under his shoe and toeing the crushed remains off the kerb and into the gutter, and pretends not to notice there's still a good two inches of smokeable tobacco left in Julian's when he does the same.

"So where _do_ you see yourself in twenty years?" Harry asks. It's partly jest, to see if it'll make Julian frown or roll his eyes or laugh after how aggravating he'd found the question when it came from their house master, but mostly a sudden and genuine curiosity. There are all sorts of things he's learned about Julian in the two years they've known one another – his favourite colour, bottle green, and writers, H.G. Wells and George Mackay Brown, and the number of times he managed to watch Star Wars on a single ticket by hiding behind a large potted plant when someone came in to clean up between screenings, five – but not this.

"In my castle," Julian repeats patiently. "Doing whatever I like." He laughs when Harry nudges him with his elbow, retaliating with a gentle kick of his heel against Harry's shin. " _Alright_. I've no idea. Is that an answer?" Harry says nothing, waiting; it feels like there's more, something Julian's putting off saying because he thinks it's strange or silly, and eventually he adds quietly, "Well. I'd quite like to fly."

"What do you mean, with wings? In a balloon? Be specific, I'm trying to visualise it."

"In _planes_. My grandparents were pilots. My mother too, she races gliders. Or..." He trails off again, looking unsure, and when he finishes his thought he twists it into a sort of joke as if to pretend he doesn't really mean it when Harry's sure he absolutely does. "Imagine flying into space. Or being able to work on the machines that send people into space, or the code and mathematics and maps and logistics and things. I'd like to take Carrie Fisher up there and colonise Mars."

"I expect I'll be dead," Harry says carelessly. He rather enjoys the idea of being thirty-five forever, like Mozart. "I shall be a tortured artist painting complex works of wonder in a freezing attic somewhere and I'll die of malnutrition, or some terribly romantic disease. Consumption, perhaps, or syphilis. Then in a hundred years I shall be rediscovered and hailed posthumously as a genius, and I shall live forever even though my earthly remains are rotting in an unmarked pauper's grave."

(Twenty years later Merlin will remind him of this conversation over his earpiece while he's on a mission in Monte Carlo, and Galahad will hide his face in his hands, groaning.)

"Not sure romantic is the right adjective for syphilis," Julian says, mouth curling up only on one side the way it always does when he's trying to suppress a grin.

Irrationally annoyed that his moving fantasy death is being so irreverently mocked, Harry says peevishly, "Well, I imagine it depends on the person one catches it from, doesn't it?" as he's brushing the brick-dust from the back of his jacket. "I suppose we ought to go and face the music."

"Music," Julian says grimly, "is that what they call it?"

"Shrieks of torment."

"Desperate cries of misery."

" _Ugh_ ," Harry says firmly, and goes stomping up the High Street towards their house.


	2. I'm Selectively Sensitive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's Harry and Julian against the school. Mostly it's Harry against the school. 
> 
> _"What are you drawing?"_
> 
> _"Nothing," Harry says, but it comes out too quickly and sounds suspicious, so he shrugs lazily with one shoulder and fakes a nonchalance that's becoming more and more difficult to keep up any time Julian gets this close to him. "I'm making our escape plan." He lays the sketchbook on the cushioned bench between them, sketching rapidly as he talks. "We make a rope from knotted bedsheets, like so, and hop it out of the window as soon as this infernal rain stops. Scarper across the rugby field, hitchhike to Dover, steal a boat, sail to Europe, and join the circus."_
> 
> _Julian's studying the doodles and nodding gravely. "Yes, I see. I think it'll work. What's our act?"_
> 
> _"Theatrical sarcasm," Harry suggests, and Julian makes another accidental laugh-snort sound._

Sixth form is better, so so much better, starting with Julian turning up in the common room on the first day with a shaved head and a coolly defiant look in his eye. Conversations falter and turn into surprised whispers, while Harry, sitting sideways in the window seat with a newspaper, just stares and stares for several seconds longer than is polite – because over the summer, Julian appears to have indulged in some kind of pact with the devil and is now made of nothing but cheekbones and height.

" _What_ ," Harry says. He almost brains one of the new boys with his foot when he swings round at roughly the speed of light to bound across the room and grab Julian by the shoulders, turning him round in a circle ninety degrees at a time to inspect him. "Good fucking lord. Explain yourself. How dare you?"

"Cut my hair?" Julian asks as he comes back around to face Harry. There's laughter in his voice and something warm and very slightly smug in his eyes, like he bloody _knows_ he looks good and wants everybody else to know it too – which, frankly, has always been Harry's thing, and he's not sure he enjoys competition of such a high standard now it's here staring him in the face. Staring _down_ at his face, even worse.

"Grow taller than me."

"Believe it or not, I didn't have a lot of say in the matter."

"Bloody hell." He feels strangely off-balance, having to tilt his head back to look at Julian's face when he's so used to being the taller one, but he's reluctant to take a step away because – _oh_ , he realises with a hot jolt of dismay, _oh shit_.

* * *

The common room is unusually full on Guy Fawkes Night, sleeting rain and a howling gale making even the most dedicated outdoor-types think twice about leaving the warmth and golden glow of the house, and certainly ruining any chance of a bonfire. Harry's claimed the same window seat he always does, leaning back against one wall with his stockinged feet up on the cushion to turn his legs into an inverted V, an improvised table for his sketchbook. There's chalk dust everywhere, white and blue scattered as fine as flour across the striped upholstery, a smudge of vivid green ruining the pristine edge of his shirt cuff, long amber fingerprints marking the grey of his uniform trousers where he's absently scratched an itch. He mutters _fuck_ under his breath, short and sharp and clicking hard on the _ck_ sound, and across the room Julian glances up from the letter he's writing. Harry's not looking, exactly, but he senses the movement at the very edge of his periphery and his idiot body, completely without his permission, locks onto it like a heat-seeking missile: a skittering wave of goosebumps moves up the entire length of his spine, making the hair on the back of his neck feel prickly, and his eyes flicker sideways to find Julian looking at him with his eyebrows raised in a silent question.

_Alright?_

_No_ , Harry replies, using a scowl instead of words, and a disgusted chalky hand gesture at his page. _I've forgotten how to draw._

One eyebrow slides down, the other still propped high and creasing a ridge of wrinkles in Julian's forehead. _Can I see?_

Harry tells him _NO_ with a shake of his head, then pulls an exaggerated grimace. _It's terrible. Everything is terrible. My life is terrible._

 _Shut up_ , Julian says with an eyeroll and a barely-concealed smirk. He goes back to his letter, fountain pen scratching beautifully neat cursive across the page, and Harry watches him as intently as if letter-writing is a sport now and this is the World Cup final, before realising what he's doing and hastily dragging his eyes away. There's a quiet _thunk_ when he tips his head back and connects with the wall; it's gentle enough not to hurt, but nevertheless it's a satisfying little sound, and the coolness of the brick feels good against the rising headache he can feel thrumming just the other side of his skull. Almost without thought he swipes his messy hands off on his trousers, leaving chalky rainbows all up and down his thighs, and finds a pencil instead to start marking off shapes on a fresh white page: the angles of a jaw, sharp and straight; cheekbones, jutting and broad over softly shadowed hollows; the nose, long and straight like a downward arrow pointing to the slanted squiggle of mouth, pulled up at one corner in a smirk. And the eyes... Harry wants his chalks back now. The pencil isn't enough, graphite too flat and drab to capture something so bright and _alive_.

"Fuck," he says again, and cracks his head back against the wall a bit harder this time, a percussive accompaniment to his muttered curses. "Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck."

"Pipe down, Hart," someone calls crossly from across the room, and Harry whips round to glare at him – of course it would be Whittaker, the little prick, all ruddy face and tufty hair and a dreadfully overinflated sense of self-worth. "Some of us are trying to read."

It's a struggle not to snap back, it always is. Harry grits his teeth against the instinct to start hurling abuse about Whittaker's pedigree and manages to arrange his face into one of bland, polite concern. "I'm awfully sorry, I didn't realise you were struggling. Would you like some help with the longer words?"

There's a ripple of laughter in the room, and amongst it a glorious muffled snort. Harry abandons the vicious pleasure of watching an insult hit its target and turns to look at Julian again, finding him still working at his letter but now with his lips pressed tightly together to hold back another outburst. It's fascinating, watching him compose himself: quick and so subtle, barely anything to it, just a deep breath in and a long, slow exhale through the nose, face relaxing as he goes until he's back to neutral with nothing to show for it except the gleam in his eyes when he glances over at Harry again and shakes his head in fake despair.

Harry settles back against the corner of the wall and window and starts drawing again: the curve of broad shoulders and the folds in fastidiously tidy rolled-up sleeves, long fingers curled around a pen.

A while later – ages later, long enough to have moved on to sketching in the gargoyley forms of the other boys in the background – Harry's so into his work that he doesn't realise Julian's moved until he's right beside him, and then he starts in surprise and hastily turns a page to start doodling something new.

"Budge up," Julian tells him, prodding at Harry's calf with a bony fingertip until he grudgingly moves his legs far enough for Julian to sit next to him, sideways and twisted with his back to the rest of the room and his hand printing itself into the condensation on the window pane. "Filthy weather. What are you drawing?"

"Nothing," Harry says, but it comes out too quickly and sounds suspicious, so he shrugs lazily with one shoulder and fakes a nonchalance that's becoming more and more difficult to keep up any time Julian gets this close to him. "I'm making our escape plan." He lays the sketchbook on the cushioned bench between them, sketching rapidly as he talks. "We make a rope from knotted bedsheets, like so, and hop it out of the window as soon as this infernal rain stops. Scarper across the rugby field, hitchhike to Dover, steal a boat, sail to Europe, and join the circus."

Julian's studying the doodles and nodding gravely. "Yes, I see. I think it'll work. What's our act?"

"Theatrical sarcasm," Harry suggests, and Julian makes another accidental laugh-snort sound that's so loud it makes Whittaker sigh dramatically and make a big elaborate show of turning a page.

"Acrobatic satire."

"The cynical trapeze."

"Hate spinning—" Harry circles one finger in the air to demonstrate a spinning plate "—on big sticks."

"A little miniature car full of contempt that just keeps tumbling out of the doors and everyone in the audience is thinking, no, my god, how does it all fit in that little tiny car?"

"Will you two _be quiet_?" Whittaker yells when they start spluttering and laughing again, slamming his book closed with a heavy bang like punctuation and altogether making far more noise than everybody else in the room combined. Harry desperately wants to retaliate; instead he puts all the effort it would have taken to do so into drawing Whittaker strapped to a target and surrounded by throwing knives made up of the word 'bollocks', because he thinks it'll make Julian laugh again, and it does.

* * *

There's a moment one rugby practice that almost ruins him.

" _Yes_ , Jules," Harry yells triumphantly as a miraculous beauty of a kick goes sailing between the posts. The mud on the field is icy cold and churned to soup, so slippery that what Harry assumes was supposed to be a slap on the back as Julian runs past turns into the skidding collision of a sideways hug, Julian's arm curled close around his shoulders trying to right himself – but there's no purchase on the ground, shoe studs useless in mud this deep, and the momentum knocks Harry off balance and sends them both collapsing in the muck. He can feel Julian's shout of laughter as a hot breath on his chilly neck, an upsetting sort of _squelch_ as the mud they land in propels itself up inside the hem of his shorts. There seem to be too many limbs, a dirty tangle of them, thighs and forearms glued together by filth in a way that sort of makes Harry want to keep burrowing down until he can drown himself and escape this cruel and unusual world.

"Jules?" Julian repeats, sounding amused as he's scrabbling about with his knee far too close to Harry's balls trying to find a more solid spot of ground to get up from.

"I don't know," Harry says desperately, "it just came out of me, like a fart." He accepts the hand Julian offers to pull him to his feet, slips in the mud caked on their fingers and palms, and lands on his back again, groaning, with his arm flung over his eyes. "It's no use, I'm done for. Save yourself. Leave me behind to die."

"Never."

Harry risks a peek though the gap at the crook of his elbow, suddenly rather glad for the freezing mud he's managed to smear across his cheeks because it's hiding the flare of heat he can feel rising there: Julian, about a million feet tall, is towering above Harry like a muddy god of war, Mars in a rugby shirt, silhouetted against the pinks and golds of the late afternoon sunset with his hand held out like something noble and magnificent from a classical painting.

"Never," Harry repeats stupidly, and Julian starts impatiently opening and closing his fingers until Harry finally reaches for him and gets hauled to his feet.

"Never. Not even if you call me Jules." Then as he's taking off at a jog to throw himself back into the game he gives Harry a smirking sort of grin over his shoulder, and pushes a thing that's already complicated enough to the point of pure absurdity.

* * *

It's not so difficult, really, feeling like this. At least, it's not uncommon: of course it's not exactly condoned, but everywhere one turns in boarding school there seem to be boys with relationships just slightly too intense to be mere friendship. Harry finds himself drawn to them, watching them when they pass in the corridors or out on the street, glancing at them from beneath his lowered eyelashes during lessons, wondering endlessly whether any of it is real. In them, in him, in Julian. He wonders, leaning back carelessly in his chair so far that the front two legs leave the floor as Hoffman drones on and on about Milton, if it's not real, then what is it? A bit of fun? A rite of passage? Just one of those things that's done at school and then never spoken of again in the real world? If that's the case, then what—

A folded up scrap of paper lands on his desk, and Harry casually starts arranging his books and pencil box into a sort of wall to give a bit of privacy from the sharp peering eyes of classmate snitches and the master himself.

_We should go to the pub tonight. If I dare you then you can't say no._

He glances over the desk beside him, moving only his eyes; Julian is studiously writing comments in the margins of his book, occasionally looking up at Hoffman and making some little nod of agreement or moue of dissent as though nothing in the world is as important as picking apart the words and intent of a poem so it loses all its magic. He's too fucking good at this. In the three and a half years they've been at school together, he's never once been in trouble despite the fact that any scheme or note-passing or prank is invariably his idea.

_Just casually sit down with a pint where any busybody looking through the window as they pass can see us? I'm game if you are but it seems a little risky._

" _Hart_ ," Hoffman says from the front, as sudden as a gunshot, "I don't believe you're listening to a single word I say."

Harry's trained himself by now to look completely blank in the face when he's told off, because nothing annoys the masters more than boys not scraping and apologising for every single minor fault. There's a calculated note of boredom in his voice as well, just enough to give his tone a sharpened edge but not so much that it could ever count as outright defiance. "The mind is its own place," he quotes from memory, dangling a pencil carelessly between his fingertips because he knows Hoffman hates a fidget, "and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."

Hoffman's moustache twitches angrily; he hates being wrong about Harry's ability to take in information without seeming like he's making any kind of effort. Then a look of something that's almost glee breaks across his face and he raps his knuckles smartly on his desk for attention. "Is that a _note_ , Hart?"

"Yes, sir," Harry says patiently. He holds up his exercise book and flips though a couple of pages. "Lots of notes, which I believe is the point of our bringing these funny little books to lessons."

"A _note_. We're talking about Milton and you're passing notes with a schoolboy. He must be remarkably good, your pal." There's a hideously misplaced sort of pride in Hoffman's voice; he clearly thinks he's terribly clever and witty. "Do share with the class. Come up here and read it out loud."

Beside him, although he's not looking, he can sense Julian's shoulders going stiff.

Decision made, then. Harry puts the note in his mouth and chews it hard, like it's gum or the terrible leathery boiled meat they think is acceptable to serve for dinner at this school.

A murmur of delight ripples through the classroom: there are boys who like Harry and his tomfoolery, and boys who hate him and enjoy the thought of him getting into trouble but hate Hoffman even more, so for a glorious moment it's twenty boys on a single side, a united front against the blustering old master losing his rag at the head of the room and bellowing _HAAART!_ like a melodramatic villain in a ridiculous old film. Beside Harry, Julian's got his palm clamped tightly over his mouth and just for a few seconds his shoulders shake helplessly with laughter before he controls himself. Buoyed up with triumph, Harry grins at him and swallows the chewed pellet of paper. Evidence destroyed.

"If you enjoy notes so much," Hoffman says, deathly quiet voice cutting sharp through the sudden anticipatory stillness of the room as he scrawls something on a page torn from his notepad, "you can take this one to the headmaster."

Well. Shit.

Hours later – bloody hours, he's missed dinner – Harry strolls into the common room with a book and looks mildly at the fourth former sprawled in his usual seat until the boy seems to remember a conversation he needs to be having elsewhere and slinks away. Harry slings his jacket carelessly over the back of a chair and leans back against the wall and window, allowing himself a single quick look around the room at all the others' faces before he opens his book: there's amusement and distaste there but nothing neutral, which is gratifying. Being hated has never bothered him, but feeling irrelevant fills him with fury.

"Harry," Julian says – and Harry looks up at him, the weirdly anxious look on a face that's always so calm, and gestures for him to sit. There's not much room on the window seat, so there's a fair bit of gymnastics involved to get comfortable; they end up almost mirrored, each leaning back against a side wall, Harry with his knees drawn up and propped against the window pane and Julian with his own resting against Harry's in a most distracting sort of way. "I should've come with you."

"Don't be ridiculous. You know I don't like being disobeyed when I give orders." It's sort of a joke – as if Julian would take orders, from Harry or anybody else – but Harry really did mean it when he gave Julian a look and an insistent little head-shake of _no_ after realising he was about to get up and make some noble confession of conspiracy.

"No, but..." His voice fades into nothing and he takes Harry's book, reading the back cover and flipping through some pages before giving it back. "So, how's your arse?"

"Unblemished." And he feels _so proud_ about it, bordering on smug. He'd wanted to grab Julian by the arm the moment he came through the door, drag him away somewhere to brag about how well he'd managed to play the system, but even stronger than his (possibly far too frequent) sense of self-satisfaction is his love of turning his own brilliance into a really tremendous story: waiting for the right moment, choosing the perfect words, revealing all the twists and turns of plot in a way that makes his cleverness seem even more than it is. "I bamboozled him."

"You..." Julian stops himself short, and just blinks. " _How_?"

"I saw—" Harry holds up the book "—on his desk." It's a breezeblock of a tome, tiny print inside that rambles on and on for interminable boring chapters about Dickens, and the headmaster's name on the cover. Harry settles his face into his best impression of an eager young schoolboy. "Gosh, sir, is that your book? My grandfather read it over the summer, he told me it's simply marvellous but I haven't had a chance to read it myself yet." Then he lowers his brows and voice, morphing into a semi-successful impression of the headmaster and attempting to replicate the musical cadence of his Welsh accent. "Oh, Hart, do you like Dickens? Yes, sir, I _love_ Dickens – Jules, I fucking loathe Dickens – and I'm so looking forward to reading your biography. Well, Hart, you know, there's a great deal of literary criticism and theory in there as well as an in depth look at the man's life. Oh, sir, my two absolute favourite things, Dickens and people who don't have a single creative cell in their bodies talking about what artists are doing wrong, I can barely contain my excitement. I don't think I used those exact words, but you get the gist. So I listened to him waffle on and fucking _on_ for hours, then he noticed the clock and said good lord, Hart, look at the time, I mustn't keep you, and he dismissed me, and now I'm here, waiting for you to tell me how brilliant I am."

"Unbelievable," Julian mutters. He looks impressed, grudgingly so but still impressed. His leg is warm against Harry's through the two grey layers of their school trousers, Julian's calf pressing harder into Harry's thigh for a moment as he shifts on the narrow window seat trying to get more comfortable. "You _flattered_ a man into not beating you up."

"I ate that note as well," Harry admits. "No evidence means no consequences."

"I'm not entirely sure that's how it works in this place."

"Well, I'll cross that bridge if I ever come to it."

Julian just looks at him for a few moments, head tipped to the side to rest against the glass. "You're brilliant," he says dutifully, fighting back a smile that prompts something hot and slightly devastating to curl through Harry's stomach.

"How very kind of you to say so. Thank you very much."

"If I hadn't seen you sobbing at Now Voyager I'd be terrified of you."

"I'm selectively sensitive."

"You could do evil things, you know, if you wanted to. You've got this ridiculous ability to—" Julian twirls his finger in circles in the air "—wrap people around your fingers." Well, that's a mental image Harry really didn't need when he's sitting this close to the main star of all his indecent dreams since returning to school. "You could take over the world if you tried."

"You could be my sidekick," Harry suggests, and Julian raises one eyebrow and gives him an unimpressed look that makes his spine fizz.

"You could be _my_ sidekick."

* * *

It's a joke of an argument that goes on for months, culminating in Harry pasting cut-out photographs of his and Julian's faces onto pictures of Superman to see who looks better and Julian laughing so explosively at it when Harry slips him the comic in the back of their Latin class that they both get lines to write.

The other thing – the way Harry's skin prickles when Julian is near, the way his eyes are drawn to that carved-stone profile in every class they have together – is decidedly _not_ a joke, and doesn't seem to be going away as quickly as his few previous infatuations have, which he thinks has mostly to do with his occasional suspicion that Julian's looking at him as well.

"You've got a ladybird on you," Julian said once, standing by the wicket waiting for everybody else to get ready to play, and Harry twisted round in circles trying to see it on his own back before Julian stopped him with a hand on his arm and slid his fingertip up a blazing little stretch of Harry's spine, scooping the ladybird up from the cable knit and bringing it round in front of them to look at. "Make a wish before she flies away and it'll come true."

"What rubbish. You don't believe that, do you?"

"Depends on the wish," Julian said, and his eyes felt as though they lingered on Harry's for half a second too long.

Or the time they dragged a table over to their common room window seat – _their_ seat, now; nobody thought of it as just Harry's any longer – and over a few days' worth of free moments Harry read Casino Royale and most of Live and Let Die out loud to Julian while he built a couple of the Dyna-Model plane kits Harry had found in an antique shop for his birthday.

"This can't be you," Harry said, picking up the tiny model pilot that came with one of the kits. "Far too much hair."

"Maybe it's you," Julian said. "You can be my—"

"Sidekick?" Harry asked, and Julian smiled softly and said, "Co-pilot."

Or the time they actually did sneak out to the pub in the next town, but missed the last bus back and had to jog home down darkened country roads on legs that felt wobbly and useless with drink. Julian grabbed Harry's arm to pull him out of the way of a car, and then didn't let go until long after the danger had passed. It was probably the beer, Harry told himself gloomily in the morning when Julian didn't seem to remember, but for those fifteen minutes his heart had raced so wildly he couldn't seem to catch his breath.

It's a warm bright day at the end of May when Harry half-hears part of a conversation in passing, one of the boys from the Upper Sixth telling his friend that _fortune favours the brave_ about something or other.

"I object," Harry says to Julian. "Fortune favours the charmer."

"Fortune might kick the charmer in the teeth one day if he thinks he can coast through life on charisma alone."

Harry opens his mouth to reply but can't think of anything, which is a first, and an extremely irritating one at that. "What exactly are you saying?"

"Nothing. Sorry." Julian slows his pace, rubbing at the inner corners of his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. "Just tired. I haven't been sleeping well."

He hesitates for a fraction of a second when they get to the common room door, so Harry takes him firmly by the elbow and doesn't let him go until they're behind the closed door of Harry's room.

"Worried about something?" he asks, digging about in a drawer to find the small bottle of whisky he keeps hidden in a rolled-up pair of socks, refilled whenever he gets the opportunity to pick the lock on their house master's office while he's out.

"No." Julian takes the bottle Harry's holding out for him and takes a sip, wincing at the taste because it's cheap and he's a worse snob than Harry when it comes to Scotch. "Only that Tompkins cornered me this morning to talk about terrifying things like university and being an adult and having to set my own meal times and such."

Harry sits beside him on the bed and gently digs an elbow into his side. "A chap of your intellect and you don't know how time works? I thought you couldn't wait for your sentence to be up. I know I can't."

There's silence then, except for the gentle glug of whisky sloshing in the bottle as they pass it back and forth.

"What's this?" Julian asks, reaching out towards the desk for a heap of scribbled on paper. Harry's heart jumps alarmingly until he's sure there's nothing weird there, none of the thirteen thousand stalky sketches he's done over the school year.

"Abandoned ideas for my project."

"Why abandoned?" He's studying them closely, like they're actually good enough to have attention paid to them. "They're great. I like—" He holds a page up, a scene done in watercolours of reeds and riverbanks and a meandering trail of swans sailing like old ships across the glittering water. "I'm so used to you drawing me, I forget you can paint like bloody Turner."

"Come on, Jules, I know I beg for compliments but Turner's a little over-generous, don't you think?" Then the first part of the sentence catches up with him and Harry goes still, frozen. "What?"

He dares a sideways glance, and finds Julian looking at him with a curious sort of half-smile. "You're not as subtle as you think you are. I don't mind. I'd like to see, but not if you don't want to show me."

"I'll show you." His mouth feels strange and numb around the words, fingers fumbling their grasp on the books and papers on his desk as though his hands don't really belong to him until he finds the right sketchbook and hands it over.

"I hope you've been kind," Julian says, giving Harry a doubtful look as though to say _I've seen how you draw the others, I don't trust you_. He's quiet for a minute when he opens the book, studying a few pages at random – his shirt and cricket jumper pulling up over a long stretch of bare stomach as he reaches high for a catch that would be impossible for anybody else in the school; snoozing in an armchair one lazy Sunday afternoon; taking aim at a clay pigeon shoot; utterly absorbed in some sort of electronics project that Harry doesn't have the slightest idea how to start to comprehend; his hands, blurred, moving over the piano keys and drawing out the rapid notes of a Chopin étude; a single bright face in a crowd of gloomy robots, Julian laughing at some political cartoon in the newspaper over lunch – before handing it back with an odd expression, something like a smile but also a desperate and crippling constipation. "That's _too_ kind."

"Have you met me?" Harry asks. "I don't think I know how to be kind."

"Yes, you do."

"I know how to be truthful. I draw what's there, I don't embellish."

"Right," Julian says quietly, and takes the whisky bottle from Harry to gulp down half its contents. Harry snatches it back and finishes the rest. "So."

"So," Harry echoes, eyes fixed on the blanket between them because it seems safer than eye contact somehow. There's a warmth in his chest, the struggle of keeping his breathing steady when his heart's beating like a drumroll.

"Should I go?"

"That might be wisest."

"Do you _want_ me to go?" Julian says softly after a moment.

He's remembering the day of the rugby: the mud, the vivid glow of autumn sunset, and the heaviness of Julian's body pressing down on his own when they toppled over and lay there flustered and laughing in the sludge. "Never."

That appears to be the answer Julian was hoping for, going by the relieved way he whooshes out his held breath and gives Harry a small, scared smile of the kind he's not seen since their very first day. The memory wants to make him laugh, for some reason, he can feel it brimming up inside him: how tiny they both were, Julian's dark hair parted neatly with mathematical precision like a film star from the thirties, and the way they'd sort of become friends even before they'd said hello by accidentally catching one another's glance in some particularly boring lecture about rules and rolling their eyes in unison.

Somewhere in the stutter of uncertain looks and half-spoken words and half-formed gestures, Harry ends up sitting against the wall at one end of the narrow bed with Julian's head in his lap. It's an unusual new angle; a wonderful one, one he could quite happily get used to, he thinks. He slides his fingertips lightly along the edge of Julian's collar, down his shirt sleeve and the muscles beneath, and to the bare skin on the back of Julian's hand where it's resting against his chest.

"The others all have Kate Bush and Blondie on their walls," Julian says. It's more of a murmur; he sounds like he's half asleep. He turns his hand over in Harry's and awkwardly weaves their fingers together in a way that suggests he's never held somebody's hand before. "You've got Oscar Wilde."

"I like Oscar Wilde," Harry says defensively, then, more quietly, voices the thing he's felt for years but never had a reason to say out loud before. "I'm like Oscar Wilde."

"Not as funny. Much more handsome. I think his hair might be worse than yours, but only slightly."

"Now who's the charmer?"

Harry's trying to figure out the right wording for a rude joke regarding the poster of Apollo 11 in Julian's bedroom and what that might say about him, but it's too much effort when his head is spinning the way it is. Instead, he just taps the back of his hand against Julian's mouth until he gets the message and starts kissing him there, across his knuckles and down the length of all his fingers, and Harry prays for time to halt exactly where it is.


	3. Do you even live in a castle?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Summer in a rundown Disney castle on the Aberdeen coast. Piano and painting and ghosts and finally, FINALLY, some action.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Arabesque – Debussy](http://youtu.be/A6s49OKp6aE)  
> [Fantaisie-Impromptu – Chopin](http://youtu.be/B-HosIOod_A)  
> [The ridiculous/amazing castle I've appropriated for the Beaufort-Stuart family home](http://i.imgur.com/LrbgFwa.jpg).
> 
> ACTUAL PLOT to come in the final chapter!

Julian has a look on his face promising swift retribution if Harry dares to say anything about the Scottish weather, but then again Harry's never been the most accomplished fellow in the world when it comes to impulse control.

"This is summer, is it?" he asks, as a mighty crack of lightning lights up the wide, roiling sky, chased almost at once by the ominous roar of thunder. Julian doesn't do anything as low-brow as hit him; instead he tugs on the sodden newspaper Harry's been trying to use as protection in lieu of his thoroughly knackered umbrella, and one mushy melting corner flops disgustingly onto his cheek like a wet fish. " _No_ , my hair--"

"You've got a headline written on your cheekbone now."

Harry glares at him and gives up, leaving the newspaper on a bus stop bench for someone else to deal with and scrambling after Julian through the slushy mud of the path. It's impossible to see more than a few yards through the grey sheeting rain, and Harry has a brief fantasy of just sitting down where he is and waiting to be rescued by a nice man bearing a blanket and a restorative cup of tea. He couldn't be any more wet if he skidded right off the edge of the cliff and landed in the crashing sea – _not_ what he'd hoped for his summer holiday.

Annoyingly, Julian is as fucking perfect as always. Maybe it's the hair, or lack of it. Difficult to look anything but pathetic with one's usually hairsprayed bouffant glory saturated with piss from the sky and sticking to one's face like sloppy dishrags. Ahead of Harry, Julian is striding through the muck like he's the king of it all. He looks the way Harry imagines the ancestors he claims did all those hundreds of years ago – William Wallace and Robert the Bruce marching bravely through the rain, showing the nearest English pansy what for.

"This is real weather." He's actually walking backwards now, presumably so he can laugh at Harry's struggle, which is just unfair. Harry can barely make it going forwards; he has to stop and do a little wiggle every few steps so his shoes don't get sucked right off his feet and into what he's starting to believe is quicksand below. Quickmud. Something. "None of your English pish. Rain should be _rain_."

"What?" Harry yells, because the thunder interrupted, but Julian's already turned back around. "Isn't there a bus or something? Don't you have servants who could fetch us? Do you even live in a castle?"

"There it is," Julian says, stopping short when they come to the end of a crumbling wall and bank of windblown trees. "Craig Castle. Wait for the lightning."

Harry tries to wring at least some of the water out of his hair, scowling down at his ruined shoes and determined not to look because being cross puts him in a contrary mood, but when the sky lights up again he can't resist and follows the line of Julian's pointing finger to...

"That is Disneyland," Harry says.

Julian looks for a moment like he can't decide whether or not he's offended, then a rueful sort of grin touches his mouth and he shrugs his shoulders, offering Harry a hand so he can climb the stile without slipping in the mud and breaking his face. "It wasn't always pink. They reharled the exterior when I was about four, it must've seemed like a good idea in 1966. No money to redo it since. So yes, I grew up in a Disney castle."

"You might have the decency to at least sound excited about it." He's already shivering from the rain and the cold and the howling apocalyptic wind, but Julian's still holding his hand and now Harry's fighting a different sort of tremble as well even though, really, it's not hand-holding at all, it's just being a human crutch. "I grew up in a brick box with no turrets and not even a single measly gargoyle. Did you even think of my struggle at all while you were dancing around this place in a colour-changing dress made by the fairies?"

Julian jumps off the stile step and lands as sure-footed as a cat, although he seems a lot happier than one to be ankle-deep in slurry. "Brick box?" he repeats, amused, eyeing Harry sideways. "Weren't you just bragging to Whittaker last week that your house is worth millions and Henry Fielding used to live there?"

"That little twerp. He doesn't even know who Henry Fielding is. Besides, I wasn't _bragging_ , I was _informing_. He implied I couldn't afford a haircut, I simply wished him to know I can afford whatever I want."

"You're ridiculous," Julian tells him, in a tone that suggests what he actually means is something a lot fonder, and Harry shuts up – which is a fairly awkward, really, since Julian still has his long fingers wrapped around Harry's, holding him even though he no longer needs to be steadied. Harry's mind is suddenly blank, a great big patch of fog and nothingness, but before he can start stumbling into some kind of ill thought out comedy comment to break the tension Julian releases him, rearranges the strap of his satchel, clears his throat, and says, "Come on. We'll be there in fifteen minutes."

* * *

Aside from an extremely bossy housekeeper standing over them in the kitchen making sure they remove their shoes and socks and roll up their dripping wet trouser legs before they venture upstairs to their rooms, Harry doesn't see anybody but Julian. There don't seem to be any other servants about, and the housekeeper says his grandparents are stuck in town waiting out the storm before they dare tackle the slippery hills again in their car. It's only mid-afternoon but even so there's something eerie about the silence of the castle – or at least its stillness, because it's not really silent. The howling gale outside is getting in through the windows and making it sound like there are people hiding around all the corners whistling creepy little tunes, and the ancient oil portraits on the walls are unsettling to say the least. Harry feels a jolt of excitement seeing a landscape he's positive is a real Constable, but either side of it are people in eighteenth-century costume with eyes and smiles and jawlines and noses that are uncannily like Julian's, and he can't bear to stay and investigate. Besides, it is fucking freezing.

"My room," Julian says, stopping in front of a huge heavy oak door, and points directly across the corridor at an identical one. "Your room. It's haunted, just politely tell the grey lady to leave you alone if she bothers you and she usually does. Get changed and I'll give you the tour."

It doesn't seem real, following Julian around the ancient halls and rooms and listening to him tell stories about who used to live here and which of the dogs on a rotting old tapestry is his favourite. It seems like a funny way to live. It's so cold here, and so quiet, like the castle's been abandoned and ruined for years and he's only seeing the drapes and paintings because he's got a vivid imagination.

"This was always my favourite room," Julian tells him, shooing Harry ahead of him down a little dark wooden staircase into a wide gallery: tartan carpet on the windows side, polished floorboards on the other, paintings and statues and at one end a huge grand piano. "I used to make everyone in the house listen to my 'concerts' when I was learning. Maybe that's why all the servants buggered off." He wanders off a little way, fingertips training across the marble plinth of one of the busts, and Harry follows, silent, trying to picture Julian as a child rattling around in this place with nobody but his grandparents and ghosts and moth-eaten embroidered dogs.

"Who are the paintings?"

The ones towards the piano end of the room look newer, Jacobean frippery moving through the centuries to the cloche hats and shapeless dresses of the twenties and the utilitarian military look of the forties. Julian sits on the piano bench, back to the keys, and nods up at a blonde lady in a suit.

"My great-aunt Julie. I'm named after her. My grandparents either side of her. My mother down here." He gestures to a framed polaroid standing on a corner table, a laughing woman wearing grease-smudged overalls and a Jaclyn Smith hairdo standing beside a truck whose engine is in pieces on the ground in front of her.

"No painting?"

That makes him laugh, fond and quiet. "She'd never allow it. Hates all the nonsense ceremony of this family."

"What about you?"

Julian pulls a grimace at that, but it's too late, Harry's brainwave is overwhelming. "Absolutely not."

"Absolutely _yes_ ," Harry says decisively, and runs back to his room to get his box of paints and a sized canvas, because he'd have to be dead to pass up the chance of staring at Julian for hours on end and getting to show off at the same time. He sets his easel up away from the window, wanting to make the most of the late afternoon light and the peculiar colours it offers when it's stormy, and bullies Julian until he's sitting properly at the piano looking resigned and vaguely amused.

"Are you expecting me to get this framed and put up with the rest?"

"Of course," Harry says, screwing his canvas in place and arranging his paintbrushes. "I knew I'd be up next to Reynolds one day."

"The Reynolds is a fake."

"Oh, don't tell me that. You've ruined my good mood."

Barely moving at all, only moving his hands, Julian starts to play Debussy's First Arabesque, and Harry panics and starts hacking at his pencil tip with a blade trying to hide the sudden shiver that rockets down the full length of his spine. He feels clumsy, like his hands are made of thumbs, which is fucking infuriating when Julian's sitting there blithely plinking away completely note-perfect as usual. As soon as Harry's scrubbed his sharpened pencil back down to the perfect level of bluntness he starts scribbling, hoping the muscle-memory of all these years of drawing will eventually kick in once he gets started: the lines and swooping curves of the piano, the heavy drape of the silk curtains behind it, a cross-hatch of lines to suggest the window panes. Julian himself is easy; Harry's drawn him possibly seventeen thousand times over the last year and the shapes of him tumble out of the pencil as though they've been stored there. The breadth of his chest and shoulders, muscled from rugby and cricket bowling, the cling of his black t-shirt sleeves on his biceps. The curve of his backside in jeans, casual and thrilling, far too tight after the year of such carefully tailored school uniform.

"If I'd known I was going to get a formal oil portrait painted I might've worn a tie."

"Shush. Siouxsie t-shirt is more than worthy." Moving quickly, more slapdash than usual in his flustered state, he starts blocking in the darker background colours: the deep rich green of the old peeling silk wallpaper, the dusty indigo shades of the curtain, the black parts of the piano that aren't reflecting the sudden sunshine streaming in the window. Julian stays silent, stepping tenderly through the last notes of the Debussy with his eyes on Harry; Harry can almost feel his gaze, as soft and deliberate as stroking fingers, and wonders when this is all going to come to a head. Two weeks of it, touches and smiles and glances veering from easy and confident to frightened and embarrassed and back again with enough speed to threaten whiplash. It's unbearable.

"What shall I play?"

"Anything," Harry says, helpless and lost, and of course Julian just has to launch into Chopin, into his Fantaisie-Impromptu, one of Harry's favourites. His hands blur across the keys, rapid as hummingbirds, and Harry ducks his head and goes back to blocking in the shapes of the shadows. He remembers something Julian said a while ago when Harry was lolling bored against his table in the common room making some kind of comment about how patient and meticulous he must be to spend his free time fiddling about building clocks and electronic gadgets for fun: _I've always been good with my hands_ , he'd said, shrugging his shoulders like it was nothing. _Comes from taking piano lessons since age three, I suppose._ He didn't, couldn't, and would never know the depraved things that offhand comment had made Harry think in bed that night when he was supposed to be sleeping.

"You're not even painting any more," Julian accuses, dropping the tempo of the middle section until the melody is lost completely and he seems to be playing just an unconnected, quiet string of notes.

Harry, stumbling and exposed, is too far gone even to be embarrassed any more. "Don't stop there. Finish it, then I'll carry on," he says – pleads, really – and Julian gives him that faint, lovely smile and picks up the melody again, launching into the final _presto_ section with an ease that would be infuriating were it not so impressive.

He starts playing Waterloo by ABBA after that, which Harry, after rolling his eyes and trying to hide his idiotic grin, discovers is much easier to paint to.

* * *

Harry doesn't believe in ghosts, but that doesn't stop the ghost in his room from pestering him all night.

First it's the wind, an eerie flute-like sound wafting down the chimney and into the room like faraway ethereal music. Then it's the chill in the air, even though it's July, as though the ancient stone of the castle soaks every bit of heat into its walls and leaves only a strange wintry vacuum.

He drowses for a while, then startles awake a few minutes later convinced there's a ghostly white figure lurking at the foot of his bed like a creepy undead voyeur. A bit of squinting after he flicks on the lamp makes him realise it's just his dressing gown hanging from the hook on the wardrobe door.

"Fucking Jules," Harry mutters to himself, an odd mixture of exasperated and amused as he burrows back into the heap of pillows trying to get comfortable in the unfamiliar bed, but as he's trying to force himself back into sleep-mode the other meaning of the utterance decides to put on a bawdy pantomime in his head and completely knackers what little hope he had of dozing off again. There's an irritating stirring in his pyjama trousers which he stubbornly tries to ignore, clinging hopelessly to the idea of sleep for as long as possible, but the images in his head are persistent and very, very noisy: Julian, tall and pale against the threadbare sage silk covers on Harry's bed; naked, of course, hard as granite, and – because it's a fantasy – far bigger than any seventeen year old schoolboy has a right to be, the flushed head of his cock vanishing and reappearing through the clench of his own fist, his long elegant fingers glistening wet.

He's not sure whether the sudden bravery is a side effect of facing down a ghost and coming out unscathed (even though it was a dressing gown), or the recklessness that comes from being tired, or he's just had enough of all this dancing round in awkward circles – whatever it is, Harry shoves rational thought aside and marches over to the door to go and wake Julian and sort this out once and for all, no matter the outcome.

He yells in surprise when Julian's right there in his doorway with his hand raised ready to knock ("You shrieked," Julian will insist later, but Harry will maintain for decades that it was a manly shout), and finds himself suddenly with the knocking-hand clamped hard over his mouth, Julian stepping right up close to him and closing the heavy door behind himself. Locking it.

"You'll wake everyone," he whispers, and Harry wants to reply _wake who, there's nobody here except Mrs Danvers' sister downstairs_ but he's too conscious of the taste of Julian's palm on his lips to make any sound beyond an embarrassingly pathetic little whimper. It makes Julian blink, expression twisting from urgency to something cautious and unreadable, and he slowly moves his hand away from Harry's mouth, though the other stays where he pressed it: fingers curled around Harry's shoulder, feeling hot like a cattle brand through his pyjama shirt.

"What do you want?" Harry demands, taking a step back in order to see his face properly – but Julian steps with him, and his other hand, still damp and warm from Harry's breath, carefully comes to settle on his waist.

"I couldn't sleep. Where were you going?"

"What do you want?" Harry repeats – softer, breathless, almost dazzled, because he knows what Julian wants and can't quite wrap his mind around the reality of it. Julian's gaze flickers to Harry's mouth, quick as though it's involuntary before he controls himself and looks back at Harry's eyes, searching and hopeful in a way that makes Harry's breath go absurdly tight.

"Have you seen the ghost yet?" is what he asks, stumbling and awkward.

That's not really what he's asking at all. Harry slips a hand up between them, touching his fingertips to the top button of Julian's shirt just before the V opens up to show his collarbones and the tantalising hollow between them. "I thought I did but I was spooking myself. Will you stay with me?" he asks, a breath of a murmur against Julian's cheek, as close as a kiss.

The real kiss comes seconds later, Harry tugging Julian down into the messy heap of covers he left tangled like a napkin rose on the bed when he got out and nudging his face up, bumping noses awkwardly, waiting and wanting and finally, finally breathing out through his nose in a quiet, shivering moan when Julian finds his mouth. It's clumsy, inexpert – he's never done this before, and Julian's never mentioned doing it before – but the devastating sweetness of it is enough: the sense of time holding still for a perfect eternal moment, like a photograph that moves and feels.

"I couldn't wait any more," Julian mumbles against Harry's mouth, wet and messy with their clumsy tongues, "why didn't you do anything before?"

"Why didn't you?" Harry counters, fumbling for their buttons but just getting frustrated by his useless shaking hands and tugging both their shirts off over their heads. The press and sweaty slide of so much skin against skin makes him shudder, goosebumps rattling through his flesh and making his fingers tingle.

"Not at school. It's safer here." He twists on top of Harry, settling astride his thigh and pressing against him, letting Harry buck up against his hip. Harry can already feel himself soaking through his cotton trousers, the tell-tale heat and tremors he always gets when he's stroking himself towards the point of no return, and for a moment he fights the sensation because he can't bear to have it end – then he feels Julian's hand fighting with his waistband, the touch of unfamiliar fingers closing around the tip of his cock, and though it can't be more than three minutes since Julian kissed him he finds he can't push away the craving a moment longer.

"Please," he says desperately, not entirely sure what he's asking for, and Julian says, "Yes," in the sort of tone that suggests he's not really sure what he's agreeing too either, though the slick slide of his fingers and the way they curl and tighten and release with such purpose around Harry's pulsing cock say he knows exactly what the game is. Harry comes with a stuck cry in his throat, choked right down to a harsh exhale, and barely thinking he slings his legs up around Julian's waist and encourages him with wordless little noises and touches and wide begging eyes to make believe they're fucking the way people do in films. When Julian comes Harry can feel it almost as intensely as his own, the twist of Julian's fingers in his hair, the way his breathing trembles, the desperate press of his mouth aiming for Harry's and missing, landing on his chin and cheek several times before it finds its target.

"Stay all summer," Julian says after a minute of wrecked breathing, and Harry starts stroking shaking fingertips up and down his naked spine, not wanting him to move just yet.

"Yes."

"Stay forever."

"Alright."


	4. I'd never accuse you of being polite.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "You don't know," Julian murmurs then against Harry's mouth, sliding his fingers into Harry's precious hair to tilt him to a better angle for kissing, "you can't possibly know how fucking besotted I am with you and your stupid face."
> 
> "Oh shit," Harry says in dismay, then hurriedly backtracks before Julian can draw away from him too far and drags him close again. " _No_ , absolutely _not_ shit, I only mean I wanted to say something similar just now but I didn't because I thought you'd laugh and now you've said it first and you'll think I'm only saying it back to be polite."
> 
> "I'd never accuse you of being polite," Julian says, deadpan, and launches at Harry for a kiss that's so spectacularly, ridiculously good that it bumps him back against a nearby tree and gives him a bruise on the head that hurts every time he styles his hair for the next several days.

There are many, many moments throughout the summer when Harry curses his own idiot eagerness: not being able to wait to find a more sensible backdrop for Julian's portrait means having to paint miniature portraits of all his ancestors too, which is not an easy task when their scion is making fuck-me eyes from his place on the piano bench.

"Stop it," Harry mutters. The smell of oil paint is making him feel woozy, compounded further by the fleeting smile that creeps onto Julian's mouth and fades away again. Julian's mouth is a terrible thing to be faced with in the daytime when house rules presumably say he's not allowed to stuff his cock in it; that's a special, secret pleasure to be indulged in only by moonlight, behind a firmly closed door and several staircases away from anyone who might hear the bed springs creaking.

"What?" Julian says innocently.

"Liszt and your face are bearable separately, but you're giving me both at once and now I've gone and painted your esteemed great-grandfather with a balloon for a head."

That only makes his grin wider, but he relents and starts playing slow, quiet scales instead as though he needs something to keep his hands occupied while he's just sitting there. "If you weren't such a sassenach crybaby we could be up a mountain or something instead of being stuck in the castle all summer."

"Put a cork in it, you know how distressing I find the rain." Harry touches his hair self-consciously to remind himself that it's still as tall and glorious as he sculpted it this morning in front of the bathroom mirror. "You call this summer? I've never been this wet in my entire life."

The corner of Julian's mouth lifts again in the crooked little half-smile that always makes Harry feel like he's sitting on top of a gorse bush, and he begins to play his Liszt again. "That sounds like a challenge."

"You're a monster," Harry tells him, furiously blobbing at his painting and wondering when exactly it was that he developed such a devastating fetish for being teased like this.

* * *

He does go out eventually, of course, several times, although he grouses the whole way through each one as if he's being frogmarched to his execution instead of going for a nice walk in what Julian reminds him severely is the most beautiful place on earth.

"It's not even raining. Your hair's safe."

"It's not raining _yet_ ," Harry says ominously, peering at the dark clouds gathering behind some mountains at the horizon like they might suddenly decide to rush over and piss on him as a prank. Really he doesn't mind very much at all; it's just that complaining about any kind of exercise has become almost a personality trait these days, a habit like fingernail-chewing. He can count on half the boys at school looking over at him in barely-contained eagerness during every P.E. class now because they know he'll have some sort of withering comment to make about the kind of men who deliberately choose a career teaching teenage boys to throw beanbags at a target drawn in chalk on a pavement. For all he claims not to give a single shit about what people think of him, especially the smug little turds at school, he actually cares acutely: not what they think of him, but that they do think of him, and do it often. Hideous, really, but addictions are tricky, even the fucking stupid ones, and Harry Hart is the egotist equivalent of a sixty a day smoker.

"You ought to be wearing a kilt," he says suddenly, and Julian turns to look down at him from the rocks he's climbing, his mouth lifting at one side with slightly baffled amusement.

"Why?"

"So I could put my hand up it."

"You've perked up a bit."

"Yes, because I accidentally thought about you in a kilt and how I'd like to put my hand up it." Harry scrambles up beside Julian, effortlessly quick and almost graceful now he's forgotten he's supposed to be making a fuss, and they pick up the faded trail of another path leading higher into the mountains. "Is this still your land?"

"No. I mean, not all of it - the path is, but not much more of the forest beyond here. It was all ours, years ago. We still own the fields and things near the house because we can make a bit of money from farming, but all the rest was sold off piece by piece. By the time I inherit the place I doubt it'll be much more than a vegetable garden and some rubble." He glances back over his shoulder at Harry, a grin showing clear in his eyes although it's no longer on his mouth. "In case you're only after my riches."

"Oh please, I thought I'd made it perfectly clear what I'm after."

Julian stops on the path then so abruptly that Harry would have walked right into him if Julian hadn't turned around and stopped him with a hand on his chest. "Remind me."

Harry splutters a bit. " _Here_?"

"There's nobody around for miles." Julian still glances around as though they might not have noticed a crowd of Peeping Toms lurking behind all the trees surrounding them. "Not if you don't want to," he adds, a note of hesitancy creeping into his voice, so obviously Harry has to fling himself at him then out of some desperate need to make sure he knows that of all the many things Harry wants in the world, Julian's tongue in his mouth is definitely somewhere in the top three.

It's a good kiss - they're always good kisses - and there's a delightful something extra about doing it for the first time _in public_ , which is technically where they are even if there's nobody else around. For a fleeting moment Harry forgets this sense of freedom is always going to be the exception to the rule: that they can't just flit about kissing whenever they feel like it, not with the lives they lead and the families they have. His parents are more or less living full time in yachts off the Côte d'Azur with their respective lovers these days while Harry's stuck in his grandparents' poky little house full of dead butterflies, but of course it's his deviant behaviour that would cause the ruckus if anyone found out. Maybe he should join the club and pick up a married mistress instead of this heir without a fortune who's made up entirely of elbows and sarcasm and ferocious loyalty and--

Julian's hands slip down over Harry's backside for a very invasive grope and Harry sags against him, breathless and wriggling, mouthing messy kisses above the collar of Julian's knitted jumper. If he were in love with anyone else this is the moment he'd say it out loud, he thinks, here in the wood surrounded by birdsong and vivid green and the scent of flowers and pine and damp loose soil, but Julian might laugh or roll his eyes or something so he keeps quiet.

"You don't know," Julian murmurs then against Harry's mouth, sliding his fingers into Harry's precious hair to tilt him to a better angle for kissing, "you can't possibly know how fucking besotted I am with you and your stupid face."

"Oh shit," Harry says in dismay, then hurriedly backtracks before Julian can draw away from him too far and drags him close again. " _No_ , absolutely _not_ shit, I only mean I wanted to say something similar just now but I didn't because I thought you'd laugh and now you've said it first and you'll think I'm only saying it back to be polite."

"I'd never accuse you of being polite," Julian says, deadpan, and launches at Harry for a kiss that's so spectacularly, ridiculously good that it bumps him back against a nearby tree and gives him a bruise on the head that hurts every time he styles his hair for the next several days.

It's somewhere in the next woozy half-hour or so that they realise, actually, they're not alone any more.

It starts with the snap of a twig or something, which is definitely not caused by either of them given that Harry's lying in a soft patch of long grass between a couple of rocks with his nine mile long legs twined around Julian's thighs and Julian panting above him, feebly wiping their mingled come off his hand with a hankie. Said hand goes straight to Harry's mouth to hold in whatever exclamation he was about to make, which is thoroughly disgusting, and Julian goes dead still above him, listening intently.

Voices next, and heavy footsteps.

Silently, Julian rolls off Harry and inches to the edge of the path, scanning the place lower down where they'd been walking before they climbed higher. Harry stands and creeps on tiptoe to the other side of the little rocky area they're in, searching the part of the path they never reached. It's that direction where the sounds are coming from and he waves Julian over, both of them holding their breath and trying to get a good sight line between the rocks without drawing attention to themselves.

"Do they work on the farm?" Harry whispers as close as he can get to Julian's ear, and Julian shakes his head slowly as the three men come around a bend in the path and into view.

"Never seen them before in my li--"

He stops suddenly, and his fingers curl close, almost painfully, around Harry's wrist. Moments later, Harry realises why: the man in the middle is bleeding from an ugly gash on the head that's soaking his blond hair on the left side and dripping down into his eyes and over his cheek. The other two are half holding him up, half dragging him along the path, and Harry watches with a mounting horror that makes his mouth go bone dry as one of them reaches behind himself and brings a gun out from the back of his waistband while the other forces the bleeding man to his knees.

"I don't think so," Julian murmurs calmly, and picks up a rock the size of a golf ball from the ground at his feet.

"Jules, what if they're, I don't know, gangsters or something?"

"I don't care if he's Satan, nobody's getting shot in the bloody head on my grandad's land."

They're getting hit in the head by rocks, though. His first missile lands beautifully dead centre, hard enough to bounce, and the man with the gun yells in what's probably just as much surprise as pain. He clamps his hand over his bleeding head, staggering clumsily down on one knee while the other man looks wildly around and up in the sky like he thinks it might be some freakish summer hailstorm. Harry swiftly attacks him too, one larger rock that slams heavily into his shoulder and a little one that pings like a bullet above his ear. Actual bullets follow and Harry hauls Julian back behind one of the tall rocks for safety, but the man's shooting crazily, too disoriented by his injury to aim very well, and as soon as his gun's empty Julian and Harry grab more rocks from the side of the path and go at them again, sometimes missing but more often than not meeting some soft bit of flesh or hard bone and doing enough damage that the man with the gun starts running lopsidedly back along the path the way he came, one arm swinging painfully and uselessly at his side after having a rock the size of a rugby ball dropped on his shoulder from high above.

" _Look_ ," Harry whispers urgently, but Julian doesn't need to follow his pointing finger to the motion because the shape in the woods near the battleground below steps out onto the path then, unhurried and somehow all the more menacing for it even though he's carrying nothing more dangerous than an umbrella. There's something vaguely eerie about it all, just because they look so out of place: the unbelievably handsome man in the beautiful grey tailored suit slowly strolling towards the others, the man who'd been seconds from an exploded brain accepting the hand to pull him to his feet, both of them advancing now on the man with the gun, who's collapsed groaning a little way down the path, and the other one, who seems too frightened to even try and escape.

"We should go," Julian says, and tugs at Harry's jumper when Harry sticks his head around their hiding place for another look. " _Harry_. Now. Let's go."

"I know it's not the time or place but that man with the brolly is making me feel weak at the knees."

"I'll smash your head in with a rock in a minute as well. Come on."

"Maybe it was poachers," Julian's grandad Jamie says later when they've finished telling him about it, but he sounds doubtful and he glances at his wife in the other armchair, eyebrows raised questioningly until she shrugs and puts her hands in the air, the familiar _I have absolutely no idea_ gesture that seems like the only reaction even halfway suitable for all this mystery.

"Maybe it was spies," Maddie says, turning her eyes demurely back down to the sock she's knitting but not before Harry sees the gleam of secret laughter there.

Jamie snorts in amusement, starting to light his pipe. "Spies in Castle Craig? Whatever next? Sounds like you both handled them well, anyway, whoever they were," he adds with an approving nod at both of them, which Harry finds almost overwhelmingly gratifying; he's not sure his own grandad would realise if he never came home at all, and if he did realise he probably wouldn't care very much. "I'm going to phone the police."

But the police don't find any evidence there was anybody there at all, and when Julian and Harry go back out early the next morning because the curiosity is burning too hot to leave it alone, there's not even any blood on the path even though it's the only night it's not rained in weeks.

* * *

Julian's grandad cries with pride when he sees Harry's finished portrait the day before they leave to go back to school, which feels like it should be a bit embarrassing but actually makes Harry go all lumpy in the throat as well. He hangs the painting on the wall in the gallery next to the one of his sister, Julian's namesake, and Maddie goes up on tiptoe to kiss Harry's cheek fondly and says he's welcome back for Christmas too if he doesn't mind the cold.

"They know," Harry says later, gasping and writhing on the bed and squeezing his eyes shut because he knows from six weeks of experience that if he so much as glances down for half a second at Julian sucking him off he'll come like fury and he wants to drag this night out forever. "They can't not know. Nobody could look at that painting and not know I love you."

"So what if they do?" Julian says, replacing his mouth with his hand for a moment so he can talk and stroking slow and tight and wet, the head of Harry's cock catching on his dripping lower lip every time his hand slides down. "I think I want them to."

_So what if they do? I think I want them to._

That's an astoundingly lovely thought. A bit overwhelming and bit terrifying, but lovely. Harry wonders for the first time what would happen if he went to breakfast in the morning shamelessly holding Julian's hand, but then his cock is down Julian's throat again and his brain stops working.

* * *

Going back to school feels even more like being dragged into hell than usual after such a perfect summer, only then something enormous happens to change everything. Later Harry will think of his life before this date and his life after it, a boundary as solid as a line painted down the middle of a road.

Julian's got a frown on his face, the particular little crease that always appears between his eyebrows when he's about to accuse one of their classmates of foul play.

"Jules?" Harry says hesitantly.

"Isn't that...?"

Harry turns to see what he's looking at, and... yes. Yes, it is. The overwhelmingly handsome one with the huge piercing blue eyes is leaning casually against the side of a hackney carriage watching them from the other side of the road. When he sees they've noticed, one side of his mouth flickers up in a smile that Harry can't decide is smug and dangerous or innocently friendly because he's too cross with himself for getting sweaty palms at the way it conjures up a dimple in the man's clean-shaven cheek. The other, the man with slicked-back blond hair and discreet little line of stitches near his hairline, is leaning into the car through the open door and searching around in his briefcase, ignoring them.

"What the bloody hell are they doing here?" Harry mutters. "Are they following us? This can't be a coincidence, surely." Then, unable to help himself and deeply aggrieved about the whole experience, "Good fucking lord, he's handsome. I've never seen anybody who looks personally hand-crafted by God before. Make him stop."

Julian elbows him for that one, which he probably deserved. Harry rubs slowly at the sore spot on his arm, glaring suspiciously at Mr Beautiful who's still looking back like the two of them are fascinating exotic animals in a zoo. "Don't say anything," Julian murmurs, barely moving his lips, when Harry takes a breath to ask what the guy wants. "He's up to something."

"What do you--"

Mr Blond turns round then, the motion of it smooth and elegant like he's in a ballroom instead of at the side of the road in a mild drizzle surrounded by schoolboys, and swiftly he throws something small across the road at them. Obviously Harry catches it neatly out of the air before it belts him in the face, a reflex from the years of forced cricket he's become good at completely against his will - but then he realises that he's standing in the road holding a hand grenade, and the reflex that comes next isn't one trained into him by aggressive school masters but something he dredges up from a hidden place he didn't know he had in him.

"Jules," he says urgently, throwing the grenade back up in the air only the slightest fraction of a second after catching it, and by some kind of miraculous telepathy Julian understands exactly what Harry wants him to do: his trajectory calculation happens at the speed of light and he swings his cricket bat hard at the grenade, just as calm and focused as he is during all their matches, smashing it away from the people and houses and cars all around them and far across an empty field where - anticlimactically - it doesn't explode, although Harry thinks his heart might.

Anger follows immediately after, sparked by the glint and narrowness of Julian's eyes and how tight his mouth always gets when he's furious. Together they cross the road to confront their tormentors, Julian gripping his bat so firmly that his knuckles are stretched white, but even now Harry's got the weirdest feeling that something's not adding up properly here. The two men are having the same kind of silent conversation with meaningful looks that he and Julian have in the common room at school when they don't want everyone else listening in, and when the boys reach them they're actually smiling like they're impressed or even something close to proud.

"Who the hell are you?" Julian demands. He looks magnificent when he's angry, and also a bit terrifying like something Biblical or a sort of Scottish schoolboy gorgon. For the first time Harry gets a sudden and extremely clear vision of the kind of man Julian's going to be in ten or twenty or thirty years - fierce and effortlessly competent and the earthquake epicentre of any room he walks into, a poise and dependability and fearlessness about him that's unmatched by any other person in the world. It makes him feel _sad_ , a vivid stab of it that jumbles around in his guts any time he accidentally finds himself thinking about this unavoidable future where Julian is doing something remarkable and Harry's no longer by his side because there's no viable path for them to walk together beyond the confines of school.

"Paul Bannon," Mr Beautiful says, offering his hand, which of course Harry shakes because he's a tart and even if the man just tried to kill them his eyes are a truly miraculous blue and his jaw was carved lovingly by Michelangelo and artworks like this are usually roped off in museums and can't be touched.

"Robert McKay," the other says, with an aborted hand gesture that looks like he thought for a moment about offering Julian a handshake but decided against it from the acidic look on his face. "I'm sorry about the theatrics, we were curious to see whether that rock attack in the wood was a fluke. Call it the first test. Which, by the way, you both passed with a panache I was _not_ expecting. Quick thinking, quick action, teamwork, accuracy, awareness of your surroundings, care taken to minimise casualties... I'm impressed."

Even Julian can't resist a good bit of intrigue, especially when it comes with a side plate of flattery. His eyes narrow again, but he seems to be struggling to keep the curiosity out of his voice as much as he'd like to. "Test for what?"

"How old are you?" Bannon asks instead of answering.

Another brief internal struggle later, Julian gives up and says, "I'm eighteen in October."

"Eighteen next week," Harry says. "What's all this about?"

People all around them are openly staring, nosy little bastards. Harry usually thrives on the attention of his peers, good as well as bad, but now he wishes they'd all just fuck off because there's something going on here that's giving him butterflies and it's not just because he can smell the spice of Bannon's aftershave standing this close.

"Eighteen's awfully young," McKay says slowly, eyeing them both like he doesn't quite trust them which is a bit rich considering he's the one throwing hand grenades at schoolboys. "Though perhaps that's a good thing. A new generation, new perspectives, new skills. Shake the place up a bit."

Bannon makes a considering sort of humming noise, studying Harry and Julian for a long moment before his face collapses again into that creased, glorious smile. "God knows it needs it." He reaches into his inside pocket and draws out two business cards, fanning them between his fingers like some hustler in an old film showing off with playing cards. When they take them to inspect, Harry sees a letter K logo embossed in gold on one side, and a Savile Row address on the other.

"You're tailors?" he asks, suspicious, and Bannon's grin widens a notch.

"Is Superman a journalist?"

"If you're interested," McKay says, "make your way to that address by seven p.m. tomorrow and we'll explain more."

Harry and Julian just stand there mute as the men get back into their car and take off down the high street.

"Was there really any need to be that fucking mysterious?" Harry says eventually, annoyed with himself for being so enthralled by the romance and drama of it all. "It sounds like a cult. We're not going, are we? Just walk out on our last year of school, scupper any chance of university, enrage our families, all because a pair of strangers in exquisite suits said we should?"

But he already knows they'll be going, and a glance at the dawning excitement in Julian's eyes makes him hope desperately that they've managed to stumble upon that path after all.


End file.
